The Rediscovery of Joseph Smith's Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar: A Short History

The Alphabet and Grammar of the Egyptian Language prepared by Joseph Smith and his scribes in 1835 has been hidden away in a vault in the Salt Lake City Church Historian’s Office since 1855. All indications are that the Church Historians have been aware of the document’s whereabouts since at least 1908. That didn’t stop them from denying its existence even when two of the Church’s most dedicated defenders, Dr. Sidney B. Sperry and Dr. James R. Clark, inquired about it. Clark and Sperry finally extorted the secret from the Assistant Historian in 1935, though they were not permitted to inform the public about the discovery until some time thereafter.

When finally Clark and Sperry began to publicly discuss the document, they neglected to mention of the fact that it contained absolutely no accurate information about the Egyptian language. To make matters worse, in 1956 Mormon scholar William E. Berrett straightfacedly declared that Joseph Smith had developed “the first Egyptian grammar in America,” and had done so entirely independently of Champollion! Berrett felt he could safely make this claim because the Grammar had never been published and was available only to authorized personnel. In fact, Dr. James Clark went so far as to state that he didn’t think the Alphabet and Grammar should be submitted to scholars. He preferred to “depend on our testimonies of the gospel.” Fortunately ex-Mormon researchers Jerald and Sandra Tanner were unsatisfied with Clark’s solution, and in 1966 an inside source at the Church Historian’s Office provided them with a microfilm copy of the document. They published it, in its entirety, in their book Joseph Smith’s Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar. It is still the only edition of the Grammar currently in print, and is available from Utah Lighthouse Ministry for a mere eight dollars. (Michael H. Marquardt's edition of the Joseph Smith Egyptian Papers improves considerably upon the Tanners', but is out of print and difficult to find.) The Tanners’ publication of the document demonstrated once and for all that Joseph Smith could not translate Egyptian.

For a fuller account of the saga of the Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar, see Jerald and Sandra Tanner’s recounting of the tale in Mormonism: Shadow or Reality, pages 355-365.